i ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS n 



end? in what use ? And the answer always comes in 

 terms of the will to know which puts the question. This 

 at once yields a simple and beautiful explanation of the 

 different accounts of Reality which are given in the 

 various sciences and philosophies. The purpose of the 

 questions being different, so is their purport, and so must 

 be the answers. For the direction of our effort, itself 

 determined by our desires and will to know, enters as a 

 necessary and ineradicable factor into whatever revelation 

 of Reality we can attain. The response to our questions 

 is always affected by their character, and that is in our 

 power. For the initiative throughout is ours. It is for us 

 to consult the oracle of Nature or to refrain ; it is for us 

 to formulate our demands and to put our questions. If 

 we question amiss, Nature will not respond, and we 

 must try again. But we can never be entitled to assume 

 either that our action makes no difference or that nature 

 contains no answer to a question we have never thought 

 to put. 1 



1 That the Real has a determinate nature which the knowing reveals but does 

 not affect, so that our knowing makes no difference to it, is one of those sheer 

 assumptions which are incapable, not only of proof, but even of rational defence. 

 It is a survival of a crude realism which can be defended only, in a pragmatist 

 manner, on the score of its practical convenience, as an avowed fiction. On this 

 ground and as a mode of speech we can, of course, have no quarrel with it. 

 But as an ultimate analysis of the fact of knowing it is an utterly gratuitous 

 interpretation. The plain fact is that we come into contact with reality only 

 in the act of knowing or experiencing it. As unknowable, therefore, the Real 

 is nil, as unknown, it is only potentially real. The situation therefore in no wise 

 sanctions the assumption that what the Real is in the act of knowing, it is also 

 outside that relation. One might as well argue that because an orator is 

 eloquent in the presence of an audience, he is no less voluble in addressing 

 himself. The simple fact is that we know the Real as it is when we know it ; 

 we know nothing whatever about what it is apart from that process. It is 

 meaningless therefore to inquire into its nature as it is in itself. And I can see 

 no reason why the view that reality exhibits a rigid nature unaffected by our 

 treatment should be deemed theoretically more justifiable than its converse, 

 that it is utterly plastic to our every demand a travesty of Pragmatism which 

 has attained some popularity with its critics. The actual situation is of course 

 a case of interaction, a process of cognition in which the subject and the 

 object determine each the other, and both we and reality are involved, 

 and, we might add, evolved. There is no warrant therefore for the assumption 

 that either of the poles between which the current passes could be suppressed 

 without detriment. What we ought to say is that when the mind knows 

 reality both are affected, just as we say that when a stone falls to the ground 

 both it and the earth are attracted. 



We are driven, then, to the conviction that the determinate nature of reality 

 does not subsist outside or beyond the process of knowing it. It is merely 

 a lesson of experience that we have enshrined in the belief that it does so subsist. 



